


trust exercises

by Aicosu



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Bond Shenanigans, Inappropriate Use of the Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 23:08:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22005961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aicosu/pseuds/Aicosu
Summary: Rey asks Kylo Ren to buy her some tampons.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 260





	trust exercises

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to ghostsjogging on twitter, for this amazing prompt that turned out way longer than intended.

He looks behind him before looking back at the shelves, quickly raising a hand towards the pink and purple products.  
  
“No.”  
  
“No?” He asks out loud.  
  
“No, what even is that, that’s not tampons, that’s makeup wipes.”  
  
Kylo’s hand falls away and he leans forward to read the flourished script on the wrapper. She’s right.  
  
“Where even are you?”  
  
“The store.” He grunts, flicking the makeup wipes and turning to look down the aisle.  
  
“What store?” 

“The, uh, fuckin'” His hand waves about the ceiling and his eyes track for a sign or an advertisement. 

“Are you at a pharmacy or not?” He can feel Rey’s annoyance bubbling beneath his skin like it’s his own. 

“The fucking pharmacy, yes.”  
  
“Go to the women’s section.” She demands. 

Kylo glares, looking around the empty makeup aisles and raising his hands at it. “This _is_ the women’s—”  
  
“No, it’s—! Just go to your left and toward the back.”  
  
It takes him a second to see what she means, but he compiles, shoving his fists into his jacket and funneling a surge of discomfort and embarrassment through their connection because if he has to feel it then so does she — but if she notices she doesn’t say anything. 

“See, here, this is it.”  
  
“Condoms.” He hisses, narrowing his eyes at the shelves.  
  
“No!” Rey’s annoyance is anger now and so is his. “Past those!”  
  
“Why is it they put them next to each other then and why do you expect me to know stuff like this—”  
  
“Why is nothing simple with you? You can never just do what I ask and you complain the entire time-”  
  
“You’d think they’d at least put signs—and no I don’t complain, _I volunteered_ to come here or are you forgetting about that—”  
  
“Signs! It says right there, feminine care! Read it if you need to but it’s _right there!_ Honestly, I knew asking you was a bad idea, you aren’t reliable for anything! And here I thought this nonsense would finally be convenient but no—!” 

“Fuck! Whatever, fuck—just st-stop yelling!” His hands cover his ears despite the fact that she’s inside his head, not next to it. He’s also aware, not for the first time, that he looks insane yelling at no one. But Rey keeps on, so he just reads the labels quickly, scanning the colors and name brands and little silhouettes of women jumping until he just grabs one. 

“Wait—no—”

A heat of humiliation floods him from head to toe. Molten. Like being dipped in hot water he feels his body shiver, stoop, and his shoulder sink. His fingers squeeze the box.

It’s not from him.  
  
“What?” He asks, the hitch in his voice fighting against the sudden and overwhelming control she has over his sensation.  
  
“It’s not— those aren’t—”

He feels him— her, actually— shrink low into the bed. Shyness filling him— her, actually— as the blanket wraps around them and she buries her face in her knees.  
  
He shifts on his feet and clears his throat from the tightness the swift loss of anger leaves him with. “Rey.”  
  
“Ughhh.”  
  
“Tell me." He urges. Softly. Slowly. "Get it over with."

“They’re not…. big… enough.”  
  
“Oh.” He considers the box. Light, it reads. Little. He had supposed. Rey is… tiny. He can picture her eyeline glaring up at him from just above his waist. “You’re short.”  
  
“What does that have to do with it?” She spits.  
  
A fresh blush floods his ears and he recognizes it as all his own. “I don’t know.”  
  
“It’s… just, it’s about— It has to do with—” She struggles. 

But what she can’t say flashes through him as she thinks it. Situations, experiences, memories of her own past shopping sprees at 11 p.m. in her second pair of sweatpants and her muddy boots, grabbing two boxes and a handful of chocolate bars.  
  
“Okay.” He nods, tossing the box to a lower shelf and pushing past all the rest to find ones that made sense to her. Ones from those memories. “Then… these, or…?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Okay.” 

“One? Two?”  
  
“One.” She hurries. Another rush of humiliation breeches their border. A sickly little thought of math and numbers. Money. Thought about and tossed away quickly so he won’t see it. He does.  
  
He grabs two, pursing his lips and blocking her from the fact.  
  
“Anything else?” He asks on the way to the register.  
  
“No.”  
  
He grabs a fistful of chocolate bars anyway and an energy drink for himself. 

The cashier doesn’t small talk, nor look at him funny, and he didn’t really expect him too but Rey does. Buried in her bedding she wriggles in the back of his mind waiting for the worst.  
  
He preoccupies his own thoughts with the boxes of tampons, reading the sizing again and thinking about the new biology he just learned. A logical makeup of things he’d just never had to think about before. _Not big enough._  
  
Kylo shifts and tries not to think something stupidly cliche.  
  
“It doesn’t work like that, force, why would you—”  
  
“I know, I get it, I know—”  
  
“Don’t think of me like that!”  
  
“I specifically made a point not to!” 

Rey goes quiet after he exclaims. He's left glaring at the containers of gum before he notices the cashier staring at him. 

He blinks quickly, “Just—” his hand flies to his ear, pushing on it like it might be a bluetooth. “Just give me a second.”  
  
The cashier looks away and taps the credit card reader. 

Rey’s buried again in blankets. 

He pays and takes his bag in a hurry, ignoring the receipt. 

Heading to his car he talks fast. "Think about the directions really hard or give them to me slowly or maybe, write the address down and stare at the paper or some—" 

"Just take them to the east building and I'll pick them up there." 

His hand stilled on his car door. "Are you kidding?" 

She doesn't answer. 

"Why all this trouble, why the emergency? Y-You said you couldn't leave your house." 

"I'm not giving you my address." 

"You think I bought you tampons after _you_ _asked me to_ so I could what, rob you? That's my master plan?" 

"I don't know! I don't know, I just don’t—  
  
“You don’t trust me to come to your door but you trust me to buy you feminine care,” He glares.  
  
Guilt swells in the pit of her stomach and he prys at it when she doesn’t answer.  
  
“You’re okay with asking me to drop my schedule to get you, buy you, things, but not okay with looking me in the eyes when you take it—”  
  
“Stop! I just don’t want—” She struggles. That sinking, pulling feeling gets stronger. He feels her lay down in her side, feel her glare at her blankets.  
  
“So what? You hate me enough to run your errands? Fuck, Rey, I didn’t think you were so—”

That guilt isn’t guilt. 

It’s pain. 

A piercing noise seems to filter through their connection. Or maybe it’s just the grind of his teeth. A throbbing, dull, throb, wracks through his stomach and hips. His knees ache. Kylo puts out a hand on the roof of his car to keep steady. His other tries to push at his abs.  
  
“Fuck!” He groans but doesn’t hear himself. Or Rey for that matter. Just the strange, wrangling, twisting, knot of expanding and contracting pain. “S-shit! What the fuck! Fuck—”  
  
“Don’t be a baby.” she hisses.  
  
It’s hers. 

“Rey—”  
  
“I’m not lying when I say I can’t get out of bed, okay?”

“Okay— just—” He huffs. Is he sweating? He hastily opens his car door to sit down, thinking the position change will help. It doesn’t and he has to stand immediately, scrambling to press at this back.  
  
“It’s just bad this time.”  
  
“No shit.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
She actually sounds it. And he doesn’t doubt she hadn’t meant to share the sensations. Just as he hadn’t in his car accident last week. He wants to point that out but doesn’t. 

“It’s fine.’ He says fast, nodding. “Just— let me over, okay? Don’t make yourself walk over there that far. Not like this.”

She’s quiet. 

“Rey.”

“Alright.” 

The pain subsides and doesn’t come back his entire ride over. He’s not sure if that means another bout of cramps just hasn’t come, or because she’s gotten better at wrangling them to herself. 

“Two more exits.” She directs. 

Rey lives… far. 

And not really in… a great area. 

He’s more surprised than he should be. Or maybe not. He’s not sure. And he really, really, doesn’t want to be rude even though her attitude through this whole thing might deserve it. He wants to tease her — but not about this. Not about how far she lives from college. From Luke and Han and her friends. 

Or that she lives in… the less income-driven areas.  
  
Heck, he’d refused to pick up drugs here before. Refused to race down here even.

When he gets to her apartment, he thinks she’s lied to him because he pulls into a mechanic’s lot. He’s about to yell at her about it like maybe this whole thing was some prank. Making him buy tampons and drive 30 minutes over the railroad tracks to laugh at him with her friends sitting there listening. It doesn’t make sense, of course, especially when she points out the ruddy apartments on the top of the shop front and garage. 

“You live here?” 

It probably sounds judgmental enough to warrant the immediate annoyance. 

“Sorry.” He hurries, fist rubbing at his mouth. 

When he climbs the stairs he thinks she might tell him to leave the bag and go — but she doesn’t. He doesn’t even make it to the landing before her door flings open. 

There’s something weird about feeling and thinking and talking in your head for so long only for that to go cold. To turn off. When you’re face to face. 

Suddenly he has no idea what she thinks or feels at all. 

She stands there in an oversized shirt and shawl, with capris and slippers and two-thirds of her normal hair twists. She’s a mess really. There’s dirt on the side of her eyes. Or makeup. Or… grease, since all he can smell, is oil and gas. She looks tired. Short. 

Pretty. 

His ears are hot. He shifts, feeling strangely tall with an apartment door so short and small.

“Don’t say anything.” She says suddenly. 

“About what?”

“Anything.” Her arms cross. 

He shakes his head, glaring but going silent, and lifts the pharmacy bag to her. 

She takes it like he stole it from her, opening it immediately and looking in, hand digging and moving the stuff around. 

He tries not to watch her and he tries not to peek into her apartment so he ends up staring at his shoes. 

If she’s upset about the chocolate bars and extra tampons she doesn’t say. Instead, her voice cracks. 

“H-how did—” 

When he looks up, she’s smiling. Wide. Her eyes look lighter, and her cheeks are flushed. His throat tightens.

“How did you know I liked these?”  
  
He’s so floored by the expression and the race in his heartbeat he almost doesn’t notice she’s pulled out the energy drink. 

The one he bought for himself.  
  
Kylo gestures emptily, stuttering. “It, uh— I w-was—I just—”  
  
“Thank you." She looks precious and he hates it. Holding the can and looking up at him like an alley cat surprised to not be kicked. "Thanks— you didn’t have to do this in the first place and you did and then all this and I’ll pay you—”  
  
“Don’t.” He and then, “stop it,” because her face is crumbling. Like she might… cry. 

“Rey.” He says forcefully,  
  
“Sorry — it’s nothing. It’s all _this_.” She gestures at herself, letting the bag fall on her wrist as she pops open the can.

Kylo watches her gulp down his drink and purses his lips to stop from smiling or asking for it back. 

When she’s done she turns and stops. As if forgetting the door is opened. Forgetting that he’s there or maybe that she has to say goodbye in a conversation or—  
  
“Do you… wanna come in?” She asks.

 _Oh._ _  
_ _  
_ Nerves tingle from his hand to his neck. Embarrassment. And he’s not sure if that’s him, or her, or both of them. 

“Y-yes.”  
  
Gasoline and oil fade to something more like laundry and a cooked meal.  
  
“Close the door behind you?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
He does so, glancing at his car in the lot one last time.

Hopefully, it doesn’t get stolen.


End file.
